Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

I hadn’t recovered when Missionary Kwon arrived later that afternoon; maybe I have never recovered. He cleared his throat, his eyes resting on Cheolmin, who was sleeping facedown on the dojjari . I was teaching Namil how to do a handstand, and he tumbled to the floor feet first as I let go of him and sprang to eager attention, hands at my sides. I’d be more useful to them on the outside anyway, I told myself. I wanted to leave immediately, even if it meant facing my parents.

I could have timed Missionary Kwon’s steps toward Cheolmin with a metronome. He inspected him, then disappeared down the hall and returned with Missionary Lee.

“Is this how you’re running my safe house?” Missionary Kwon’s quiet voice could have needled straight through a bolt of wool.

“We were just taking a break.” Missionary Lee frantically shook Cheolmin by the shoulders.

Missionary Kwon pulled up Cheolmin by his armpits and held him like a scarecrow. Missionary Lee did nothing. Cheolmin grabbed Missionary Kwon’s hands and dug in with his nails, his face screwed up with so much fury that I ducked as if his fists were flying at me.

“You could have hurt him!” said Missionary Lee, but he stayed half-hidden behind Yongju.

Still holding him by the armpits, Missionary Kwon lifted Cheolmin into the air until their faces were inches apart. “I hear you haven’t been very successful in memorizing your daily verses.”

“He’s only missed a few, and he’s really trying,” said Missionary Lee.

“Missionary Kwon, I am trying.” Cheolmin’s eyes were hard and cold.

The missionary set him back down.

“No dinner today for you. No verse, no food. We’ll stick to this every day until you conform fully to my rules. I’ll come personally to check if I have to, but I expect…”

He frowned, drawing out the fine lines under his eyes. “I expect Missionary Lee will be honest in his reports.”

Cheolmin said, “You heard. I tried. I got most of it.”

“Most? If the Lord’s sacrifice of his own son saved us from most but not all of our sins, would that be enough to bless us with the eternal gift of heaven?”

“And if I give up? Are you going to starve me?” The bulldog look came over Cheolmin’s face.

“No, don’t try blackmailing me. I don’t recommend that. One girl I tried to help — she went on a sort of strike. She wouldn’t study or read the Lord’s words — she abandoned her soul. I can tell you we were patient, and we moved her from safe house to safe house for more than three years.”

A chorus of voices, including mine, said, “Three years?”

“We tried so hard not to give up on her… The discipline’s for your sake, jaashik . You North Koreans can’t understand our system, but trust me, I’ve done this work for years. Without discipline, this house would be utter chaos. Most Christians won’t even take kids like you in, because of the potential trouble.”

“They’re good boys.” Missionary Lee approached Cheolmin and wrapped his arms around his neck. “They’re God’s children, too!”

Ignoring him, Missionary Kwon turned to me. “I need a word with you, Daehan. That shouldn’t surprise you.” I was ready.

I followed him down the exposed concrete stairs and out the front gate toward his car, my head a muddle. Who I was, what I believed, all the neat black-and-white boundaries of the map of my life no longer made sense. I rubbed at my hair, my cheeks, and wished I could strip out of my skin. The sun warmed my back after precisely ninety-nine days without direct sunlight on it and the foothills were finally a verdant green, but none of it mattered.

He dusted off the boxy sedan’s windshield and windows with a soft mop from the trunk, taking his time. I waited a few steps behind him, my hands folded together. I realized that my ankles were peeking out from my pants, and that in the last months I’d outgrown Missionary Kwon. He got into the car and fiddled with the navigation system, then looked out at me. “Are you going to stand there all day?”

So I lowered myself onto the hot prickle of the passenger seat, prepared to be kicked out of the safe house and be liberated.

He tapped impatiently at the black screen. “Do you know how to make this work?”

Of course I understood the psychology of machines, which was actually only the psychology of their maker. I watched Missionary Kwon from the corner of my eye, the smooth facade of his face, which was beginning to remind me of a salesman’s. What he’d said about discipline and faith in the safe house was probably mostly true, but it was also unjust and cruel and, worst of all, dangerous. I was thinking about the nature of God, and especially about how to confess, when Missionary Kwon started the car and I was suddenly off the premises with a man I’d accused of being a potential murderer.

I prepared myself. “Missionary Kwon—”

“Daehan, I want to tell you a story about a man,” he said. “This man is me.”

Before I could stop him, he launched into how he had once languished in a South Korean jail, a no-good man abandoned by society. I became extremely uncomfortable, suffocated as I was by my own secrets.

“I lost everyone — my wife, my brothers and sisters — to my ways. I lost my son.”

He tapped a photo dangling from the rearview mirror, a grave young boy around six. I couldn’t imagine Missionary Kwon as a father, but then maybe no one ever really seemed like a father.

“There wasn’t anything illegal I didn’t do. I did my time as a loan shark, I ran a gambling ring, I had my hand in everything until I got caught. My son would be your age now, you know. He’s in Cheonan, in South Korea. I get to see him a few times a year. That’s it. If I show up at any other time, my wife calls the police. The church saved me. God tested me, and I tested him, but now I know he reserved me for a greater purpose.”

My North Korean friends, and the others before him, were the greater purpose.

I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

He kept talking as if he were speaking more to himself than to me. I managed to stay quiet the way an older man would expect me to and kept my eyes fixed on that dangling family photo. My head was filled with his confessions, this family man, the man with a dark underbelly of a past, who helped and hurt the people entrusted to him. A man, in the end, who believed in God.

Finally, we stopped near the river, a very different river in the summer heat with its banks overgrown with willow trees. There were smugglers openly working in some sort of cooperation with a border guard, sending their goods across with a car tire supporting a length of plywood. The village on the other side had gray walls surrounding peaked roofs and chimneys. Men were fishing, a woman was doing laundry in the river, and kids were playing on the bank. It seemed so safe, bucolic even.

“Missionary Kwon—”

“Pay attention. I drove here for you.” He lowered the windows. “ Geogi, there’re journalists in that car ahead. Probably South Korean. There they are.”

They were filming the fishermen across the river. The North Koreans, finally noticing the camera’s body jutting out of the tinted window, wearily thrust their fishing rods in the air as if they were used to being watched. Only one of the men threw his rod to the ground. The camera panned across them. It was as if a whole society was being watched and followed against its will. I wanted to throw rocks at the reporters in their cars and stop them.

“We shouldn’t be gawking at them,” I said. “They’re people.”

“Half of those kids’ll probably cross over as soon as the water warms up a little; they’ll beg and make some money for their family or keep eating whatever they find until they’re full or get caught. Most of them only care about food. You’d be that way, too, if you’d been hungry your whole life. I make it my business to know as many of the kids who cross as I can.”